Elements > Historical Perspectives

Everyone we meet and every place we go has a story; these stories have a past, a present, and even shape the future. We hope to better understand our own history by visiting the very places where it occurred. We seek to become history detectives. If we know the estate home of Thomas Jefferson was built by slaves, when we visit we can recognize his brilliance and his privilege while also gaining a better understanding of the contradictions in his writings and his actions. A chance meeting with a veteran of the Vietnam war while visiting memorials in our nation's Capitol, gives us a personal and first hand account to several paragraphs in a one dimensional American History book.